


"Cashier number six, please!"

by Lulannie



Series: Ribs [1]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Powers, Angst, F/F, Lena Luthor Needs a Hug, Multi, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-06
Updated: 2018-05-06
Packaged: 2019-05-03 06:18:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14562732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lulannie/pseuds/Lulannie
Summary: In which Lena Luthor has to deal with the fact that her soulmate is the automated checkout voice at the supermarket.





	"Cashier number six, please!"

**Author's Note:**

> tannoy  
> BRITISH  
> nountrademark  
> 1\. a type of public address system.
> 
> This will be moody.

"Cashier number six, please!"

Sometimes, Lena wonders if her birth mother laughed (a breathless, blissfully exhausted post-labour laugh) when she first caught sight of the words on her squirming baby's torso. Did she trace the words with a delicate finger? Blow raspberries on the decorated skin? Did she watch her daughter, sleeping in a nearby cot, and envision the day she'd walk her down the aisle, giving her away to someone deserving of those bright eyes?

Lena doesn't know. 

She only remembers Lillian's snarl of disapproval, all curled upper lip and sharp eyes, and Lionel's tired, wistful expression.

A year into Lena's residence at the Luthor Mansion, she draws on her resolve and knocks a tiny, pale fist against the door of Lex's room. Upon entering, she again  summons the beginnings of her Luthor-induced courage, pulls up her crisp black blouse and (politely) demands answers. Lex, soft hair and twinkling eyes, acquiesces. 

Lena learns about "supermarkets", "shopping centres", "cashiers", and something about a disembodied voice that she has a little more trouble wrapping her head around. Lex shows her pictures that he pulls up from his computer, talking her through the process, careful not to play any videos or sound bites. He rolls up the leg of his trousers and shows her the writing encircling his left calf, written in a language neither of them can read nor recognise. 

They talk for hours about a thousand different things, and at dinner Lex pulls faces at Lena when Lillian starts  expostulating angrily about things Lena doesn't understand.

She thinks, for the first time in a long time, that everything might just be okay.

-

A week after Lena turns eight, Lex passes his driving test. He manages to convince their mother, with much resistance, to allow him to drive his sister home from school, giving the chauffeur the afternoon off. 

Outside the school gates, he pushes his sunglasses up into his hair and waggles his eyebrows as the prim little girl spots him. She breaks into an excited little trot which would have been perfectly abhorrent to Lillian, and even giggles when her brother swings the passenger door open with a flourish.

They're comfortably quiet on the journey, and when they take a turn which is most definitely not in the direction of the Luthor mansion, Lex only taps his nose in response to Lena's inquisitive eyes. After circling the car park for some time, they pull up outside a giant building. When Lena catches sight of the bright lettering on the building's front, she thinks she might be sick with excitement.

_ A shopping centre _ .

"Happy late birthday."

They traipse around the complex for almost an hour. Lena watches with fascination as staff,  _ cashiers _ , pass items from a conveyor belt to the awaiting customers with a steady  _ beep, beep, beep  _ that she thinks she might remember from early trips to the convenience store with her birth mother. The last store they visit is nearly empty of both people and stock, the signs on the windows proclaiming, "Closing 04.05.20XX - Clearance! Everything must go!" 

Lex pulls a pair of notes from his back pocket, crouches down and presses them into Lena's hand. 

"Choose something."

Lena looks around. The clothes are cheap and colourful; garish slogans, holes, rips, tassels. She turns back to Lex, "Mom will hate it."

"Exactly."

They grin at each other.

Lena decides on an obnoxiously loud, floral t-shirt, and Lex finds himself a grey hooded sweatshirt with a laughably bad science pun printed in wrinkled vinyl. He nudges her in the direction of the tills, and suddenly she realises exactly why they're there. 

She notices right away that there are only four tills, and furthermore only one is being manned in the deserted store, but that doesn't stop the lurch in her stomach and the urge to itch the ink on her rib-cage.

"Cashier number one, please."

The voice is smooth and masculine through the humming tannoy, mature too - but it drifts up and down with a kind of insincere cadence that makes Lena's fists twist in the fabric as she places the clothes in front of the cashier. 

Their exit from the store is a blur to Lena, her mind buzzing loudly until she's safe in Lex's car. She grips the handles of the paper bag holding their purchases tighter.

"You don't think..." she begins.

"That the automated voice is...?"

Lena nods.

Lex chuckles and starts the ignition.

"No, it's not. I'll show you."

Back home, Lex pulls up an article from the internet, titled 'Terrence Greene - the man you didn't know you knew'. Lena skims the text, discovering it was Mr Greene's voice she'd heard at the clothing store - the voice that said almost the right thing in the complete wrong way. At the bottom of the article, there's a picture of Mr and Mrs Greene, their forearms clasped together, printed with Mrs Greene's  _ It’s recording - start at the top and read straight through _ above Mr Greene's  _ Brilliant, okay, should I-- Oh! _ .

Lena feels weightless with relief, but not so much that she refrains from scowling at her brother for the panic he caused. He explains he only meant to prepare her, so that she's not caught off guard when the time comes for real, and she's easily placated. She thanks him for the afternoon and he waves her off with an amused smile.

Downstairs, the paper bag's colourful contents are discovered, and Lillian Luthor is furious.

-

When Lena is twelve, Lionel dies. 

Lex flies home from university, and the family of three sit spread far apart on the oversized dining table. They talk funeral, will, inheritance, LuthorCorp, always skirting round the patriarch's name with heavy feet. Hours later, paper is shuffled quietly into neat piles, pens capped and chairs pushed back softly from the table. Lex and Lillian share a long look between pairs of broken grey eyes as he leaves the room. Lena trips a little on an unruly floorboard, but for once Lillian doesn't care to look up and admonish her - the matriarch stares defiantly forward, gripping the table edge a little too tightly. Lena, hands cold and clammy, raises one slowly, resting it gently over the back of Lillian's. Her thumb runs gently along the  _ I’m sorry ma’am, did you drop this? _ printed down the length of her ring finger. 

Lillian's hand turns tentatively over, and squeezes back.

-

Soon after, Lena is sent to a private boarding school in Ireland, a welcome reprieve from the painful, spiteful grimace that crosses her mother's expression whenever they share space.

Suddenly, she has free reign to stores, supermarkets, and shopping centres every other weekend. For the first time, too, she has access to a computer completely unmonitored by Lillian (though she doesn't doubt her mother would be able to retrieve the data if she ever cared to). She compiles lists of everyone who has provided the voice for automated queuing systems - in alphabetical order, grouped by country, categorised by relationship status, age, Golden Ratio attractiveness, everything. 

She alternates use of her allotted telephone allowance between Lex and the next potential soulmate on her list. She simultaneously rejoices in and curses the tiny pool of candidates that the words on her abdomen have left her with. It's a relief, at least, that as embarrassing as they are, her words are easy to hide. She watches with fascination as her roommate, Veronica, shamelessly shows off the  _ You poisonous bitch! _ that snakes down her back.

Veronica is cruel and vindictive, even as a preteen, but for the first few years at school she's all Lena has; Lex drowns in work, barely having time to gasp for air, let alone cross the North Atlantic Ocean to visit his sister. They speak frequently enough over the phone, and he's delighted when his sister's genius begins to really manifest in such away that they can playfully puzzle through the complexities of quantum mechanics together, though he's no closer to deciphering the symbols on his leg, the speaker of which he begins to resent. Lena sometimes presses him to visit their mother for something other than official business, and he acquiesces for her sake. 

Most weeks she hangs up the phone to find Veronica lurking round the nearest corner before they commute into the nearby town. Veronica complains obnoxiously in every queue Lena insists on joining, buying something cheap and superficial just to hear a voice which she knows isn't for her, even if the words might be. She makes herself get used to hearing them, ensuring she won't ever be caught off guard.

In her later teens, Lena's body catches up with her mind and she commands attention for more than just being the Luthor Prodigy. Alongside Veronica - the pragmatic underground entrepreneur, only selling, never using - she's given no trouble in her last years at school. She graduates early and moves on to MIT.

She meets Jack, sincere and charming, with the painfully average  _ sorry  _ on his jaw, hidden behind a dark beard. His eyes are kind and he makes her smile and his hands are gentle on her thighs. Once again, Lena gets the fleeting sense that everything might just be okay.

And isn't it fleeting.

She falls asleep to lightning and thunder, rain lashing the windows of her bedroom, and is woken up in the dark hours of the morning to a pounding on her apartment door. Through the peephole she sees her brother's warped face, not improving much once he's let inside. His eyes hold a mania and his hair is thinning and singed. He stinks of smoke and stagnant rainwater. Blood drips down his leg and streaky hand prints circle the unreadable scrawl that winds around his calf.

He cradles his sister's face in sooty hands before dropping to his knees. Tears mingle with the rainwater on the pilgrimage down his cheeks.

"I found him. I found him and I had to kill him."

The police come before long. They extricate the brilliant, defeated young man from his sister, leading them both to the local station. Lex confesses with little resistance and Lena is cleared of suspicion. She stays the day at the station, keeping an eye on the newsreel on the television in the waiting room. Jack brings her clothes and makeup wipes, kisses her hair, and lets her grieve. 

She's allowed to see Lex again the next morning, giving in when he begs her for news with desperate eyes. Thirteen people were killed in the bomb he set off, another six critically injured, and several dozen with mild casualties. He asks for a particular name, and her memory supplies that Clark Kent was one of the six - hurt, but alive. 

Lex, chained to the table an unable to make it to the trashcan near the door, vomits onto the table. 

-

The next 5 years are a haze. Lena graduates, and upon turning 21 invests a portion of Lionel's legacy into the tech startup she shares with Jack. Later, she hands him the reins and joins her mother at LuthorCorp, eventually taking position as CEO. Lillian loses interest in her husband's old business, and instead occupies herself visiting her son and funnelling money into industries that Lena turns a blind eye to. She hears about Veronica’s moronic new nickname, and her more moronic tattoos. Lena befriends her faithful assistant, Jess, and with some encouragement takes the step to rename the family business. She unveils "L-Corp" during one of Lillian's absent spells, and the press event goes ahead with remarkably few attempts on her life.

In celebration, she visits her local supermarket and picks up the four most expensive bottles of wine she can find. She joins the queue and catches sight of herself in the reflection of the cigarette cabinet, smiling slightly at the thought of how disgusted her mother would be - with not only her defacement of the family company, but that same day traipsing around a busy store in jeans and a grey hoodie with an ugly, peeling decal. She waits at the front of the queue for Terry Greene's (she calls him Terry now, after phoning him for advice many times in her adolescence) voice to usher her forwards. There's nothing but loud static for a moment, and Lena frowns a little, looking around. 

A shout comes from a till to her far left.

"Cashier number six, please!"

High on her ribs, Lena's skin  _ burns _ .

The voice is pretty, feminine. The girl sounds as though she's laughing. 

A customer waiting behind Lena nudges her, pointing out the tanned arm waving for attention from behind the sixth cash register. 

Lena all but stumbles over to the till, dropping the wine bottles haphazardly onto the counter. 

The cashier laughs, not unkindly, picking up the first bottle.

"Sorry, the speaker’s been on the blink since yesterday,” she confesses, looking over the wine labels, “Bad day, huh?"

Lena stares for what she knows is an inappropriate amount of time. Cashier Number Six has the softest blue eyes, wide and expressive behind round glasses. She has subtly wavy, blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail - the curled tips of which brush the nape of her neck. Her mouth quirks gently upwards, so that her cheeks lift and her eyes squint happily, seeming to wrap tenderly around every fear Lena's ever had. 

Her lips part as if to say something more, but Lena can't wait to know any longer.

"I think it might just turn out okay."


End file.
